Form and media in management and organizational history how different research programs transform the ‘Past’ into ‘History’

ABSTRACT

Management and organizational history has devoted relatively little attention to what constitutes ‘data’, hindering potentially productive discussions between diverse research programs. This article analyzes variations in how research programs observe and create empirical data. To do so, we introduce the difference between form and medium as implicated in all observations. Observation is a tight coupling (form), which is made of, and made possible by, loosely coupled elements (media). In this perspective, empirical data are media through which historians observe the ‘past’ in order to transform it into ‘history’. To explore the value of this meta-perspective on data, the article analyzes, how empirical data as media of loosely coupled elements are created differently in the works of Kr. Erslev, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and Niklas Luhmann. The analysis shows that the construction of empirical data as specific kinds of media constitutes radically different potentialities for the way in which ‘history’ can be formed. Our paper contributes to the ‘historical turn’, by opening a space for comparison and discussion between different research programs, thereby potentially leading to increased integration between the fields of history and management and organization studies

KEYWORDS:

• Empirical data
• form
• management history
• media
• observation
• the historical turn

Introduction

Management & Organizational History (MOH) was founded in 2006 to provide a platform for dialogue between historians and organization scholars (Booth and Rowlinson 2006). The journal’s vision was to pave the way for a ‘historical turn’ in management and organization studies and introduce more advanced theories in the field of business history (Clark and Rowlinson 2004). This article attempts to reenergize this conversation by analyzing how four different research programs observe the past in order to open a space for discussion and comparison between different approaches to historical research.

As scholars, we never observe the empirical world directly. Rather, we use research programs comprising theories, language, methods, or technical equipment to help make visible the empirical material of interest to us. This is common knowledge, and it is why we always make our theoretical positions clear and account for the methods we have used. In this regard, history is hardly unique, and like any other research fields, history must observe its object of study (the past) through something else. However, compared to other research fields, there is an additional layer of separation between historians and their object of study. The past is gone forever, and along with it fades the illusion that technical or methodological advancement will afford immediate observations of bygone events and actions. This sets history apart from other research fields that still hold on to the idea that verification is possible through observation of ‘reality’. This paper proceeds from the impossibility of positive representation which comes to constitute the very precondition for our approach to reenergizing the conversation around the historical turn. Drawing on Fritz Heider’s ([1926] 1959) work on perception and observation, as well as on Luhmann’s (1987) elaboration of Heider’s work, we analyze the writing of history as an operation implying both form and medium. Our approach enables exploration of the different ways in which research programs actively form the historical empirical material, thereby facilitating discussions premised on the political and far-from-neutral nature of research.

The aspiration to foster a meaningful dialogue between history and organization studies did not emerge with the establishment of MOH. Prior to MOH, the push for increased integration manifested in various forms within different institutional settings. Indeed, it has been a recurrent theme spanning back to the inception of Management Science and Business History as distinct academic fields. Its roots can even be traced back to the professionalization of history and sociology in the nineteenth century. In recent times, efforts aimed at achieving an enhanced integration have unfolded across various fields. For instance, prominent conferences in organization studies such as European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS), Academy of Management (AOM), and the business history conferences, Business History Conference (BHC) and European Business History Association (EBHA) have all featured themes explicitly dedicated to this pursuit. It has also generated a long list of publications, exemplified by works such as the anthology, Organizations in Time (Bucheli and Wadhwani 2014), The Routledge Companion to Management and Organizational History (McLaren, Mills, and Weatherbee 2015), and ‘Research Strategies for Organizational History: A Dialogue between Historical Theory and Organization Theory’ (Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker 2014).

However, whether this surge of activity has effectively culminated in a successful cross-disciplinary integration remains a matter of contention. From a optimistic stance, history and business history have become much more theoretically grounded and self-reflexive fields, and organization studies has seen an increase in historically informed research. Articles such as ‘History as Organizing’ (Wadhwani et al. 2018), ‘Rhetorical History’ (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank 2010), and ‘Reinventing Entrepreneurial History’ (Wadhwani and Lubinski 2017) have successfully integrated the fields of history and management studies. However, a more negative interpretation would point out that several of the frontrunners in the field have become somewhat disillusioned. In 1994, the organization theorist Alfred Kieser wrote the article ‘Why Organization Theory Needs Historical Analyses’ (Kieser 1994). Reflecting back twenty years later, he concluded that he had ‘greatly overrated the possibilities for historical analyses within organization studies’ and that a historical turn is still not identifiable and probably never will be (Kieser 2015, 47). Likewise, Michael Rowlinson, who coined the term the ‘historical turn’ in organization studies back in 2004, has distanced himself from it, calling the turn both an accident and ironical (Rowlinson and Hassard 2013). Even MOH has raised questions about the degree to which its own ambition has been successfully realized. In a special issue from 2016, which evaluated the historical turn 10 years after the founding of the journal, the editors concluded that it was a yet-unfulfilled promise (McLaren, Mills, and Weatherbee 2015).

Instead of casting judgment and reducing a large and important body of work to either a positive or a negative interpretation, we argue that both are valid. There have been considerable gains in both fields, but this progress has not resulted in the development of mutual theoretical and conceptual languages and frameworks. Instead, discussions have amounted to what Fernand Braudel described as a dialogue of the deaf, after his efforts to open a dialogue between historians and social scientists ended in disappointment (Braudel 1982).

Our article does not offer a quick fix. Its aim is rather to offer new theoretical understandings of why the dialogue recurrently collapses, and thus why the ambition of integration remains unfulfilled. The extant research has hitherto focused on theoretical or historical differences between the fields (Decker, Hassard, and Rowlinson 2021; Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker 2014) or suggested new, common empirical research field (e.g. Bucheli and Wadhwani 2014). We propose a third way forward by zooming in on a part of the historical research process which all historical researchers have to address, namely; how the past is made observable through the creation of empirical material. What we as researchers come to recognize as relevant empirical material depends on our research question, knowledge interest, and on our disciplinary research traditions. This is exemplified by the variety of conceptualizations of empirical material relevant for historical analyses, including ‘sources,’ ‘traces,’ ‘clues,’ and ‘data.’ In this article, we use the term ‘historical empirical material.’ The construction of historical empirical material is contingent and has implications for what becomes observable, how it becomes observable, and which interpretative frames become available in the research process. Put differently, how the historical empirical material is constructed establishes the contours within which descriptions, theses, and arguments can be formed. Focusing on observing how different research programs observe and construct the historical empirical material, rather than on the outcome of the research, will allow us to develop a language for comparing research programs, and thus to enhance our understandings of the problems and push beyond the ‘deafness’ that characterizes the current state of the conversation. With this ambition in mind, we proceed by addressing three themes that remain central in the debate between historians and organization theorists: (1) The nature of historical knowledge, (2) the difference between data and sources, and (3) the manner in which historical observation becomes possible.

Three themes of the conversation around ‘the historical turn’

Part of the conversation has revolved around the question of how to define ‘history’. The professional community of historians traditionally defined history as both a professional discipline and a knowledge/craft-based approach. History was perceived as the work of the historian, and its objective was to reconstruct the past through the methods of source criticism. With the cross-disciplinary ambition of the historical turn, and its broader focus that reaches beyond the past itself, this understanding has lost its relevance. Instead, the consensus view became to define history as a relation between experiences of the past and horizons of the future (Koselleck 1985). For example, Wadhwani et al. (2018) define history as the ‘mobilization of the past in the present,’ stressing that the historical interest is situated in the present, and Decker, Hassard, and Rowlinson (2021) define history as ‘knowledge of the past,’ which is distinct from both the past itself and the traces it has left behind. Hence, to these scholars, history emerges as an observation of ‘traces left behind,’ which are constituted by the researcher as empirical evidence of the past. It is the research process that gives such traces the form of history. While this adequately describes the research process, the precise manner in which the transformation from empirical evidence to ‘history’ occurs remains unspecified. To develop a language for how historical knowledge is constructed, this paper will employ the concepts of form and medium. Form indicates how history is gestalted and written, whereas medium is the pallet or elements arranged in the gestalt.

The second theme pertains to the discussion of data versus sources. In their article, ‘Research Strategies for Organizational History,’ Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker (2014) argued that this is a core problem in the dialogue between historians and organization theorists. The terms ‘sources’ and ‘data’ have often been perceived as interchangeable, which has contributed to the problems:

The organization theorist’s secondary data correspond to the historian’s primary sources, and the terminological difference is not purely sematic since it reveals a deeper epistemological dualism in relations to the treatment of evidence and the notion of what constitutes a cumulative contribution to knowledge.

(Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker 2014, 255)

The terminological difference between sources and data thus entails a list of methodological and epistemological issues. Rowlinson et al. provide a useful taxonomy over dichotomies such as archival sources vs. interviews; non-intentional vs. intentional material; and historical source criticism vs. methodology. Such a list of differences offers a set of concepts useful for clarifying problems and misunderstandings in projects where historians and organization theorists work together. As with most taxonomies, however, they do not improve our understanding of how and why the differences emerge. In our estimation, the authors are on the right path, when they mention the complexity of observation, but in reducing it to a part of a dualism, they fall short of developing new understandings of such differences. Their argument is that because the past is gone, it cannot be observed directly and therefore must be reconstructed through the empirical evidence. This is further complicated, because the way we construct empirical evidence ‘can be inferred from observations generated in the present, such as responses to questions’ (Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker 2014, 253).

In addition, they argue how differences in observations are linked to the dualism between data and sources:

Historians are dependent on observations that historical actors have made, which then find their way into the archives. With the exception of oral history, which mainly concerns the recent past, history stands apart from social science because historians cannot produce historical evidence; instead, they have to find it.

(Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker 2014, 256)

In this article, we take the problem of observation of the past a step further by observing how historians observe. Putting our theoretical framework of form and medium to work, we focus on how historians always draw a distinction between the historical picture they are painting (form), and the pallet they are using (medium). In doing so, we substitute the difference between theory and data with the more general and ontologically empty difference between form and medium – first introduced by Fritz Heider in 1926 and later further developed in cybernetics and systems theory. Heider suggested that all perceptions involve a relation between form and medium. Perceptions are observations that gestalt or form something. As already alluded to, observations are always perceived through something else, which Heider suggested calling medium. Form and medium are only in relation to each other. Whereas media are loosely coupled elements that represent possibilities for form-shaping (including possible perceptions of objects), form is a fixed or tight coupling of elements that emerges as the actualization of a specific potential offered by the media. The difference between tightly and loosely coupled elements are purely relational and emerge in the operation of observation. The sentences you read in your e-mail gestalt a message that is a selection and tightly coupling of elements in the medium of language consisting of loosely coupled words. Reading one word it construct again a form selecting and combining loosely coupled letters. You see the message in the e-mail, but you do not notice the medium of language it is printed into. The language as loosely coupled words represent a latent potentiality used in the specific message actualized in you reading of the e-mail, though without emptying the potential of medium for the making of other messages. In the following, we suggest understanding empirical data as specific kinds of media for research-based observations. In this view, the process of knowledge-making and research, which includes inter alia the development of arguments, descriptions, and theses is limited to the possibilities that empirical material understood as loosely coupled elements allow. This will enable us to distinguish between different research programs in how their empirical material is constructed in ways that come to constitute radically different potentials for observations. This position constitutes a shift from a theoretical and methodological perspective which analyzes how theories and methods impact and frame the historical work, to an epistemological perspective that focuses on how the historical observation is made possible within different research programs. This is akin to systems theory’s notion of second order observation and its interest in the learnings offered by comparing different approaches to the creation of data. In a similar vein, our aim is not to find the answer. Rather, we aim to develop a heuristic approach for researchers to utilize contingency in a productive way by asking themselves, what might have been, if I had created my research data differently? How would my data have emerged differently and with what implications for my study? What is offered by this theoretical development is thus a language for comparison and discussion of how we make empirical data; a language that attunes us to the differences created by our programs and the constitutive effects they have on (our knowledge of) history. As such, it helps build an increased sensitivity to how we are implicated in history’s becoming, and to the political and ethical questions that must be raised to ensure accountability, which – as we leave behind any hope of representation – must become a primary quality criteria. We hope that such a language will create spaces for dialogue in the heterogeneous field of management and organization history.

The remainder of the paper is structures as follows. First, we build our theoretical perspective by introducing the distinction between form and medium. Next, we demonstrate the value of our theoretical development by applying it to Kr. Erslev’s, Hayden White’s, Michel Foucault’s, and Niklas Luhmann’s approaches to the creation of empirical data. These four have been selected due to their heterogeneity in terms of disciplines and theories. Hence, they will serve as illustrative examples of the diversity in management and organization studies, and of how differently ‘the past’ can emerge as ‘history’ within different research programs. Finally, in the concluding discussion, we summarize the article’s arguments and explicate its contribution to the revival of the conversation between historians and organization scholars in the field of management and organizational history.

Form and medium: to observe something through something else

In this section, we develop our theoretical perspective of form and medium by engaging with how form and medium have been approached in disciplines within the social sciences. Indeed, in the past two decades, there has been an increasing interest in form and medium. One amongst several works worth mentioning is Caroline Levine’s book, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). Levine argues that cultural studies should focus more on social forms. She states that a form indicates ‘an arrangement of elements’ and defines forms as ‘all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repletion and difference, and includes as the title says both hierarchy, rhythm, and network’ (Levine 2015, 3). However, Levine remains on the form-side of the distinction, form/elements, and she only looks at how forms might differ, overlap, constrain and travel, and not at the making of the elements that are arranged in forms. Contrastingly, while Bernd Herzogenrath work, Media|Matter (2015), shares Levine’s (and our) interest in form and medium, it also stresses the other side of the distinction, that is, the loosely coupled elements comprising a medium. Herzogenrath draws the biologist, Humberto Maturana, who explained that any system (biological, psychic, social) is only able to produce the forms that its medium permits (Maturana 1978, 53). The form is that which is actual, whereas the medium is the ever present, yet non-actual. The medium is the potentiality of form making. Importantly, elements are only media in relation to forms, which means, as Herzogenrath argued, all elements are themselves forms to other media. The result is a never-ending chain of form-in-medium in form-in-medium. Herzogenrath’s work can, furthermore, be traced back to Fritz Heider and Niklas Luhmann. Heider showed how human perception always requires a relationship between things (forms) and media (Heider [1926] 1959). We never perceive a thing directly, but always through a medium. We see everything through something else. For instance, we see a car through the medium of light:

We are ordinarily not aware that mediation exists (…) We do not perceive light waves as things that touch our eyes and refer to something else. We seem to see the mediated object directly.

(Heider [1926] 1959, 2)

There are many perceptual media, some ‘natural’ such as light, water, and electricity, others socially created such as windows, microscopes, scanning devices, and mirrors (Mizrahi 2018, 2021; Seitter 2015). Heider’s point is that perception media determine the latent possibilities of perceptual forms. Forms are gestalts that emerge when elements from the given medium are selected and bound together in a particular way, like when we gestalt a melody by linking together several different tones. Form is thus a tight coupling of elements that actualize the possibilities provided by a medium of loosely coupled elements. We need loosely coupled elements to observe and perceive. When we hear a clock ringing, we hear the sound through the air. Molecules in the air are loosely coupled and do not vibrate on their own. Therefore, we do not hear the air as such, rather, clocks make the air vibrate in certain frequencies which then allows us to hear (observe) the ringing. We hear the clock ringing, but we do not hear the air that allows the ringing to be heard. The relation between tight and loos, form and medium is only a relation made within the operation of observation be it perceptual, communicative or something else.

Within cybernetics, Ross Ashby and Robert Glassman developed similar arguments in the 1950s and 1960s. They analyzed how loosely coupled systems are much more sensitive and attuned to their environment than tightly coupled systems (Ashby 1956, 55; 1960, 158; Glassman 1973). Their observations were later used by Karl Weick, who made the point that organizations are only able to observe their environment through loosely coupled elements, making loosely coupled organizations much more adaptable and flexible than tightly coupled organizations, which are characterized by strict hierarchies, high degree of centralization, and, consequently, low degree of sensitivity to their environment (Weick 1976, 1979, 1982). Moreover, in a broader context of social systems, Niklas Luhmann argued that all communication requires a relationship between form and medium (Andersen, Knudsen, and Sandager 2023; Krämer 1998, Luhmann 1992, 2012). Communication makes use of meaning as a medium. For example, communication in the form of writing makes use of the alphabet as a medium, and when communication takes the form of payment, the symbolic and generalized medium of money is applied.

What applies for social systems and for individual perception also applies for research. Researchers are only able to do the observations that their media permit. We are only able to write the forms of history that our media allow. The form creations of the scientific system (i.e. its observations in forms such as theories, descriptions, diagnoses, conceptualizations, and so on) are made possible via its media. The scientific system advances its observational possibilities by continuously developing its form/medium differences. For example, the natural sciences have been pushed forward through the creation of new media: The thermometer, the x-ray, the MR-scanner, the particle accelerator, and so on. The reading of the temperature with help of the thermometer is made possible due to the combination of tight and loosely coupled elements. The mercury consist of loosely coupled elements relative to the glass tube of tightly coupled elements making it possible to see the rise of temperature as a rise of the mercury in the glass. These are all media that enable the observation of something through something else. Examples from the social sciences are protocols, field notes, data harvested from GPS-trackers given to participants in experiments, demographic statistics, and interview transcripts.

The same goes for history (Hollander 2011). The past is gone and cannot be observed. Historians must construct a medium of loosely coupled elements to give history form in writings. The way in which this medium is constructed is a contingent cutting of the world into elements which constitute the potential for the creation of historical forms or gestalts. The gestalt is thus the transformation of the past through the empirical material to a historical representation in, for instance, a historical article or a painting. Consider, for example, how Carlo Ginzburg constructed a particular empirical data medium consisting of loosely coupled ‘clues,’ ‘evidence,’ traces,’ and ‘hints’ (Ginzburg 2012). He described the construction of loosely coupled clues as follows:

Its characteristic feature was that it permitted the leap from apparently insignificant facts, which could be observed, to a complex reality which – directly at least – could not. And these facts would be ordered by the observer in such a way as to provide a narrative sequence-at its simplest, ‘someone passed this way.’

(Ginzburg 1980, 13)

This specific medium enables certain kinds of historical observations by forming a series of mysteries or riddles. The gathering of seemingly meaningless clues leads to the mystery of how they came to be: ‘Traces that may be infinitesimal make it possible to understand a deeper reality than would otherwise be attainable’ (Ginzburg 1979, 280). Other forms and gestalt of history writing require other constructions of media. For example, as we shall show in more detail, to form history as a deep and complete painting, as Erslev endeavored, one needs a palette of many historical facts. The important point is that there is no history without the construction of a medium of loosely coupled elements, and the empirical material is not a medium in itself but must be constructed as such by the research program that cuts the material into elements. By looking at media in this way, researchers might improve our own self-reflection. This self-reflection is very useful, especially when we work in interdisciplinary spaces where the rules and approaches are not clearly defined.

In the next part, we explore how four very different historians developed different research programs to cut their empirical material into loosely coupled elements, thereby potentializing different forms for observations and history gestalts. What can we learn if we begin to compare the creation of form/medium in different types of historical work? What kind of dialogue will this facilitate? The following sections raise these questions.

Kristian Erslev: conditioned facts as medium constructed through source criticism

Kristian Erslev (1852–1930) was a key figure in turning the Danish study of history into a science. He developed his approach of source criticism in Historical Technique, first published in 1911. Erslev’s source criticism had far reaching consequences, not just on the Danish study of history up until the present day, but also more broadly on how science is viewed in Denmark in several different fields, including within political science.

Erslev stood on the shoulders of German historian Leopold von Ranke (1776–1831) who tried to differentiate between the science of history and the writing of history. Ranke broke with the historians of his time, who, according to him, were too preoccupied with either learning from history or judging it. One of his most famous quotes is:

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such a high office this work does not aspire: It wants only to show what actually happened.

(von Ranke 1973, 57)

Especially, the phrase ‘to show what really happened’ has become iconic. According to both Ranke and Erslev, source criticism became the tool that would transform the writing of history into a proper science. Erslev saw source criticism as a technical method of observation (his own term) that, if utilized properly, could lead to facts. His challenge was, however, that we have no immediate access to the past. This goes for both historical events (‘We cannot observe the past immediately in the same way that we can see with our own eyes what is going on in the present’ (Erslev [1911] 1978, 6, own translation)) and for human intentions (‘We cannot immediately look into other People’s Souls; we can see their actions and hear their utterances, and from there we must try to deduce what lies behind’ (Erslev [1911] 1978, 23, own translation)). As a technical method of observation, source criticism is a tool for creating a medium that can observe the past which cannot be directly observed. Source criticism functions by cutting up the historical material into small elements of ‘facts’ that are characterized by different degrees of certainty.

This process of dividing and assessing begins with the collecting of materials such as potsherds, documents, diaries, newspaper articles, accounts of events, buildings, and more. However, these materials are not yet sources that can constitute a medium for further historical observation. They only become such sources via source criticism. Source criticism involves analyzing the ways in which sources can be used and their suitability in each usage. It also involves determining the validity and certainty of the different assertions that the sources lead to. The evaluation and analysis are conducted by cutting the sources into facts and assigning determined (un)certainties to the facts. The sources bear important distinctions such as: first/secondhand witness, communicative/non-communicative, linguistic/non-linguistic, relics/narrations, primary/secondary and descriptive/prescriptive. Typically, the first step is to determine the credibility and the origins of the source. Thereafter, the value of the source as a witness is explored: Is it a first-hand witness, who has observed what has transpired, or have the observations merely been passed on to the source by someone else? If the witness is not first-hand, an examination of preceding links in the witness chain must be conducted until one reaches the original first-hand witness. Does B have its knowledge directly from A? Do A and B have their knowledge from the same source? If witness A and witness B are contradictory at some point, is it because witness A has one more source than witness B? Many more questions of this nature arise and must be examined. Erslev writes that:

In every way we seek to understand his personality in order to be able to calculate the point of view from which he has observed reality (…) We seek to cope with how he has observed, how the observed has transformed in him and further how he has reproduced it. As an Observer, he can be fast, sharp and accurate, or careless and vague; he may be calm and objectively minded or conversely emotional and passionate.

(Erslev 1911, 50, own translation)

Erslev further differentiated among written sources according to how and to what extent they were written with a specific intention in mind. A fact presented without intention is assigned high value. For example, information presented in sources that are based on purely practical reasons are rendered without intention and thus of great value.

According to Erslev, many historians had gone too far in their use of source criticism and nearly reduced the science of history to only encompass source criticism. These historians seemed content with simply presenting a historical archive. In contrast, Erslev believed that the real historical task only began after source criticism had been completed. While source criticism creates an archive of loosely coupled elements, it falls on the historian to form a ‘deep image’, which means to move from the separate parts toward an understanding of the general. The creation of this deep image should, according to Erslev, on the one hand be cold and objective. In the portrayal of this image, historians must observe themselves as sources of bias. Or, as Ranke puts it, ‘I wish I could wipe out my own Self’ (Erslev [1911] 1978, 47, own translation). On the other hand, Erslev believed that such deep images were not dissimilar to the portraits painted by artists which engaged the imagination of the observer:

Just as someone facing a living person cannot form an image of him or her without an imagination that allows him to connect the many individual observations, nor can the historian, and even less so because he does not have the immediate view to proceed from, and it is precisely the pride of the historian thus of the details to be able to form an image: ‘I am a historian,’ says Niebuhr,‘for I can of the preserved singularities form a complete painting’.

(Erslev [1911] 1978, 29–30, own translation)

It is impossible to know what ‘really happened’. Instead, Erslev tried to paint a picture of history, using a palette of conditioned facts. Conditioned facts do not simply appear to us; they are only created through source criticism of the collected material. The single conditioned fact is itself a form, but once such facts are in multitudes, they create a potential for different interpretations of history in the form of a (more or less) deep image.

Hayden White and the tropes as medium

In this section, we analyze how Hayden White created media for observation, and how his approach differs from Erslev’s. White brought post-modernism to the historical field by analyzing the performativity of the historical narrative form (Mordhorst and Schwarzkopf 2017).

Whites’ inquiry was focused on understanding how the empirical material available to historians, in the form of fragmented texts, undergoes a transformation into historical narratives that claim to offer a valid representation of the past. In his exploration, he discovered a solution within the literary formalist theory of tropes. According to this theoretical framework, tropes are linguistic structures inherent in all narrative forms, including those constructed by historians. From this perspective, historians, regardless of their methodological approaches, inevitably engage in narrative construction.

White’ Metahistory, is a form of history that analyzes other histories as its subject, maintaining a reflexive awareness of its nature as a narrative construct. White’s reflexive metahistorical approach employs tropes as lens to transform narrative material produced by other historians into a medium through which meta-narratives can be observed. Through the deliberate framing of this article, White employs tropes as a form of media to dissect the given narrative into loosely coupled elements, serving as a medium for the observation of historical meta-narratives.

A key issue in the forming process of history is how to transform the past – which in itself is open-ended and borderless – into research that is limited in time and space? According to White, this happens in the historical narratives, which are structured with a start, a middle, and an end. In analyzing how history is transformed from open-ended pasts to narratives with closures, White provides a historical genealogy examining pre-modern forms of historical representations. He shows that the narrative form, which has become the historical form par excellence, is not the only form ever used for written historical representation (White 1980). In pre-modern times, the dominant historical form was the ‘annals,’ which was a kind of yearbook that mentioned central events as they appeared. It is arbitrary, when and why the annals begin and end, and the events are not linked together in a narrative with a plot, argument, or ideology, rather they remain loosely coupled. Just like the past itself, the annals and are open-ended, unlimited, and chaotic as historical form. In contrast, the narrative historical form provides a structure that creates closure in time, space, and content. While marking the borders of the historical narrative in time and space, the tropes and the narrative structure create order and link the empirical material together to create the tight coupling of the material. Hence, the narrative form also structures which events and sources become i/relevant for the narrative. The truth claim lies, therefore, in the consistency and coherency of the narrative, rather than in direct correspondence with the past.

White’s book Metahistory – The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe from (1973) generated a breakthrough for the ‘Narrative Turn in History’. In Metahistory, he shifted the focus from the empirical material and source criticism to the writing of history. However, the novelty in his approach was not that he made writing the object of investigation. Indeed, historiography was already an established sub-discipline in history. Rather, White’s uniqueness was to be found in his research question. Prior to White, the central question in historiography had been: what is the best and most ‘truthful’ way of making a representation of the past in the narrative? White’s question was, in contrast, what happens epistemologically when we transform the empirical material into a narrative about the past? Thus, we might say that he was interested in how the empirical material emerged as loosely coupled elements and was transformed into tightly coupled elements through the narrativization. He thus made the narrative form itself the object of observation and instead of the archival sources, he constructed his archive from the historians’ books and historical writings.

Metahistory presents analyses of eight of the most famous and respected historians from the nineteenth century. The analyses revealed that even when historians wrote about the same events and historical processes, there were substantial contradictions in the historical narratives. Such divergences could not be explained by a difference in historical methods or approaches to source criticism. They were to be found at the level of the narrative and thus in differences in the plots, structure of argument, and ideological framings. In White’s mind, it was an illusion that the epistemological problem of observing the past could be solved through the combination of source criticism, minimizing subjective bias, and making explicit one’s theoretical foundation. These were all external tools unable to overcome the problems of the inherent, deep structure of historical imagination, through which the historian observed the past. This deep structure consists of a linguistic structure which is poetic and constructive, rather than academic and objective, and it is through this structure that we make sense of the past and represent it as narratives. The epistemological consequence is that it becomes impossible to establish a sharp distinction between history and fiction:

I will consider the historical work as what it most manifestly is - that is to say a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them.

(White 1973, 2)

So, the historian … performs an essentially poetic act, in which he prefigures the historical field and constitutes it as a domain upon which to bring to bear the specific theories he will use to explain ‘what really happened’ (White 1973, x). The prefiguring act is not a choice the historian makes; it is structural and a necessary condition. The epistemological implication thereof is the impossibility of access to the past as it was but only as it is conveyed through narrative figures. This is dualism between the past and its representation in narrative figures is akin to Immanuel Kant’s duality between the epistemological and ontological world. Kant distinguished between the world, ‘for us’ which is constructed through categories in our mind, and the world ‘in itself,’ which we as humans never access. In White’s linguistic theoretical frame, ‘linguistic tropes’ substitute such categories by prefiguring the past and transforming it into history. The tropes are thus poetic and metaphorical structures that ‘behind our backs transform and order the empirical material into narratives which postulate to be representations of the past’ (White 1973). White’s argument is not that we should stop writing history, but that we should increase reflexivity through analyses of the figuring process. With this ambition in mind, he developed his topological theory and metahistorical method.

The answer to why historians, despite they use the same sources and methods, end up with different narratives lies in their use of the tropes. According to White, this is because there are four different tropes – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony – which prefigure the narratives in different ways. A metaphor like ‘my love is a rose’ works by transferring qualities through representation. In metonymy, such as ‘I read Goethe,’ Goethe is figuratively translated from a person to an author in an externalized and mechanical way. Hence, one does not read Goethe, but rather a book authored by him, and the book is thus a representation of Goethe. This differs from a synecdoche like ‘he is all heart,’ which integrates the internal qualities into an organic connection. Finally, irony, such as ‘cold passion,’ works through negating and distancing, and thus opens a door to critical reflexivity. To take organizational analyses as examples: A reading of an organization’s slogan or brand would be a metaphorical analysis; an attempt at grasping the organization though an organizational chart would be a metonymic representation; a biography of the founder as a representation of the organization would most likely use the synecdoche as trope; and the notion that there are no such things as organizations, but only organizing, is a critical and ironical way to depict the organization. All four analyses could be coherent and consistent and at the same time contradict each other.

This short example and summary of White’s theory of tropes show how, at the epistemological level, they offer an explanation to why we have different historical narratives. At the methodological level, it offers a taxonomy that is useful to analyze how tropes are performative in the creation of different perspectives and disciplines. Social science scholars often reduce history to the narrative forms of metaphor and synecdoche, all the while seeing their own form as non-narrative (Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker 2014). Historians like White would argue that this is an illusion, and that the social sciences merely have a preference for metonymy.

In history and business history, Hayden White’s work and other representatives of the linguistic turn were seen as negative and destructive (Evans 1997; Steve and Wilson 2010). This has changed in the last decade where the insights from the linguistic turn have become more accepted in the field (Mordhorst and Schwarzkopf 2017). Just as important has been the focus on the uses of the past, where the performative element of the historical narrative becomes the main object of analyses (Wadhwani et al. 2018). This is also the case in rhetorical history which has its origin in organization studies.

Michel Foucault: statements as medium in the archaeology of knowledge

Our next example is the relationship between discourse formation and statements in Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge (1969). The purpose of Foucault’s archeology of knowledge is to problematize knowledge, which is presented as seemingly neutral, by showing how knowledge always functions in a normalizing way. Thus, the focus of the analysis is on how knowledge presents itself as valid and imposes itself onto the world, and not whether knowledge is valid. The humanities and the social sciences do not just enlighten the world, they establish regimes of knowledge and truth that regulate our interactions with ourselves, with each other, and with the world around us. Foucault encourages us to scrutinize that which is taken for granted and seemingly self-evident, and to question the ways in which strives for knowledge and reason concurrently construct the hegemonic rules of acceptability. To do so, the archeology of knowledge asks: How come this particular statement arises in this specific location, as opposed to any other possible statement? How did this statement give rise to this specific place and position, meaning? How did it bring about the objects it articulates, the concepts it asserts, and the strategic choices it expresses? Rather than seeing the relationship between subjects, objects, and knowledge as predetermined, Foucault explored how these relationships were established. He explored the world as emergence rather than being, asking how the world came to be this way, and as such how it is always pregnant with potential for different possible futures. To do so entails reckoning with processes of emergence, which are, in themselves, non-observable. Therefore, the focus of the archeology of knowledge is discursive formations and their production of conditions of possibility.

While discourse formations are observable, this observation is not a direct one. A medium is required through which the discourse can appear in the specific way that Foucault requires, that is, in its ‘playing presence’. In an interview that Foucault did as he was finishing the Archéologie du savoir, he explained it as follows:

I am simply trying to make apparent what is immediately present and at the same time invisible. My speech project is more farsighted. I’d like to reveal something that’s too close to us for us to see, something right here, alongside us, but which we look through something else. [I want] to point out that blind spot through which we speak and see. (…) To grasp that invisibility, that invisible of the too visible, that distancing of what is too close.

(Foucault 2013, 71)

The first step of the discourse analysis is the creation of the archive as a corpus of texts and other material such as paintings, buildings, prefaces, installations, etc. There are no easy shortcuts here:

One ought to read everything, study everything. In other words, one must have at one’s disposal the general archive of a period at a given moment. And archaeology is, in a strict sense, the science of this archive.

(Foucault 1998b, 263)

Since a discourse and its limits are not predetermined, the demarcation of a given discourse must come from within. This means that it is only at the end of the process that one can determine what material is to be included in the study. Only then does it become possible to view the object from a distance and thus see the formation of discourse. The archive is established only when there is a circularity in the mutual references of the material. Such a reference circularity can emerge through explicit references, contradictions, terms, topics, etc. However, even then, the archive does not in itself constitute a medium of loosely coupled elements through which observation becomes possible. Foucault’s problem was in some way parallel to Erslev’s, who was not sure if he could trust his sources. Erslev had to verify their validity and to what extent they represented the facts that they claimed to describe. Therefore, his sources were dissolved into singular facts and thoroughly exposed to source criticism. Foucault was interested in other kinds of facts, namely discursive facts. A discursive fact is not a fact due to its representation of past actions. For Foucault, a discursive fact is in and of itself a singular discursive event. It represents nothing except for itself. It is the event! Discursive facts are ‘that which speaks in discourse’ (Fuglsang and Born 1999, 76, own translation). In this way, Foucault differentiated between documents and sources on the one hand and monuments on the other. When something is described as a source or as a document, it is perceived as a sign of something else. A document documents and represents something outside of the document, and a source speaks to an occurrence in a reality it describes. A monument, on the other hand, is an event in its own right (Foucault 1986, 138–139). Most material collected for research purposes can be viewed both as a source or a monument. For example, a ministerial report is not in itself either or. If one were to observe the report as a source, it would then represent a prior political and administrative process. The same report, however, viewed as a monument is in itself an event that produces discourse. It is thus an observational choice with implications for how the material emerges as observable to the researcher. For example, the choice of observing something as a source or a document makes the observer blind to discursive facts (and the other way around).

In Foucault’s approach, the equivalent to source criticism is ‘a negative work’ (Foucault 1986, 21). This work entails the breaking down and total splitting of all the units and organizations of things that we take for granted, because they prevent us from seeing singular events, or what Foucault calls statements (enoncé in French). Foucault writes: ‘We must question those ready-made synthesis, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination’ (Foucault 1986, 22). Upon receiving a text – for example, a book, a report, or an article – we immediately categorize it in several different ways. We determine the genre of the text; is it fiction, research, or a legal document? We attribute the text to a certain author or institution, and we situate the text within a certain tradition or period. Foucault’s negative work is an attempt to dissolve and break down these categories and groupings:

The systematic effacement of merely given units makes it possible, first, to restore to the statement its singularity as an event. It is no longer regarded merely as an intervention of a linguistic structure, nor as the episodic manifestation of a deeper significance than itself; it is dealt with at the level of its historical irruption.

(Foucault 1998a, 308)

The units that must be systemically dissolved cannot be identified in advance, but they typically include units such as ‘author,’ ‘genre,’ ‘period,’ ‘topic’ ‘book,’ and ‘reference’ along with the units of language such as ‘sentences’ and ‘linguistic structures’. Foucault writes that even the book itself, as a unit, can stand in the way of discursive facts:

The edges of a book are neither clear nor rigorously delineated. No book exists by itself, it is always in a relation of support and dependence vis-á-vis other books; it is a point in a network – it contains a system of indications that point, explicitly or implicitly, to other books, other texts, or other sentences. (…) However much the book is given as an object one might have in hand, however much it is constrained within the little parallelepiped that enclosed it, its unity is variable and relative; the latter is neither constructed nor indicated, and consequently cannot be described except from out of a discursive field.

(Foucault 1998a, 304)

The archive must be cut up into loosely coupled elements in the form of statements. Only then will it be possible to ‘grasp the statement in the narrowness and singularity of its event; to determine the conditions of its correlations with other statements with which it may be linked, and to show what other forms of articulation it excludes’ (Foucault 1998b, 307; see also Mckinlay 2013). Statements, as singular events, should not be viewed as sentences or claims. A statement is recognized by what it produces. It is an event that, by being put into words, bring phenomena into existence. This function of existence has at least four aspects: Object, subject, terminology, and strategy. A statement can be recognized by the fact that it 1) produces objects. The objects that a statement refers to are not ‘objects in and of themselves’ but rather, discursive objects that are constructed, classified, and specified by the statement itself (Foucault 1986, 91). 2) It produces subject positions that can be transferred to, or assumed by, individuals. Hence, the analytical interest is not directed at a preexisting subject who supposedly stands outside of the statement as its autonomous producer. Rather, the focus is on how the statement produces the discursive places from which the statement can be made (Foucault 1986, 96). 3) It forms part of a network of other statements. There are no statements that do not, in some way, re-actualize former statements and potentialize new statements. 4) It produces a strategic connection by choosing a material medium for its production, for example, speech, text, report, contraption, technology, building, or image. In this sense, we might say that a statement is a form imprinted upon a medium, and that the imprint into a specific medium, and no other, constitutes a strategic selection (Foucault 1986, 100–103). Foucault’s negative work makes it possible to cut up texts and other material into singular statements, where each has a function of bringing something into existence (for more, see Andersen 2003).

The statement is a form. However, when combined, the breaking down of the archive into numerous singular statements, understood in terms of their functions of existence, creates a medium of loosely coupled elements through which observations of discourse formations become possible. It is, therefore, only when the archive has been broken down into statements that the discourse analysis can begin. Foucault defines discourse as a regularity in the dispersion of statements. The label ‘discourse’ names the rules of creation that generate the propagation of statements, including the propagation of subject positions, object creations, the network of concepts, and the strategic connections. There is no underlying level. The splitting of the archive into statements that are viewed in terms of their function of existence, makes it possible to describe the discourse, not in order to uncover an intention, an absent structure, or a teleology, but rather in terms of its concrete manifestation as a regularity. It is to treat the discourse ‘in the play of its immediacy’ (Foucault 1998a, 306), and thus to establish what Foucault is ’quite willing to call a positivity’ (1986, 125 italics in original). When the statements have been liberated ‘from all groupings that present themselves as natural, immediate, and universal unities’ (Foucault 1998a, 308–309), new possibilities emerge to describe the discourse formation and how it produces the conditions of im/possibility for statements.

In sum, Foucault is interested in how the world emerges as constantly open to different possibilities. This, however, cannot be observed. Instead, the conditions of possibility are diagnosed through an analysis of the discourse formations. The discourse formations can also not be directly observed but must be seen though an empirical medium of loosely coupled discursive facts (statements as functions of existence). These are created in the so-called negative work, through which the single discursive fact is wrested free from the contexts and connections in which it was buried, and which were taken for granted. Subsequently, the discursive facts may once again be observed in terms of their immediate emergence as events.

Niklas Luhmann: semantics as a medium to observe the differentiation of society

Our last example is Luhmann’s systems theory. For the modern systems theorist, the world consists of systems that observe each other and each other’s observations. The systems theorist is not positioned above or somehow outside of the world but is merely one such observer, who, as Luhmann wrote, is ‘a rat in a labyrinth and has to reflect on the positions from which he/she observes other rats’ (Luhmann 1988, 24). The unique contribution of Luhmann’s diagnosis of the present is to increase society’s capacity for self-observation by offering observations of society’s own observations. How is society differentiated in certain ways that regulate how systems are open or closed to their environment? How are certain systems tasked with solving certain paradoxes? How are systems both differentiated and coupled together? These are some of the questions that Luhmann was interested in.

However, the problem is that neither the differentiation of society, the different systems within society, nor the systems’ different couplings can be directly observed. Indeed, one of the fundamental elements of systems is exactly the fact that they are non-observable. According to Luhmann, a social system is constituted by communication. The system is a network of communication created recursively as new communicative operations refer to prior operations. How the communication continues thus depends on selections between the possibilities offered by past operations (Luhmann 1995). A social system is, in this way, backward oriented streams of communicative selections that occur and then disappear, meaning that they are momentary – bound to the moment of actualization. Communication, therefore, cannot be held in place and observed, which creates the problem of how to observe systems. Luhmann argues that, while communication constantly disappears, it also condenses forms of meanings over time. These forms are stable in the sense that they endure in time and constitute semantic reservoirs of concepts. According to Luhmann, semantics may be constructed as an empirical medium for the observation of social systems, including their forms and relations. His approach to creating such a medium was historical semantic analysis.

The historical semantic analysis poses the question: How is meaning created? Its unique approach to this question is to investigate how meaning is condensed into different forms such as concepts, and how such forms create generalized horizons of meaning for the continuation of communication. Put differently, the historical semantic analysis explores how a semantic reservoir of concepts is formed over time and establishes the expectations for how communication proceeds (Andersen 2011). Here, meaning is understood as created through communication, which means that it, too, is momentary. However, some meaning is condensed into more stable forms such as concepts and symbols. Over time, several forms are created, collectively constituting a new reservoir of concepts. Semantics is defined as this stock of generalized and relatively situational forms (concepts, ideas, images, symbols) that are available for further communication, wherein they are given a more specific meaning (Luhmann 1993, 9–72).

Luhmann was open to the idea that meaning can be condensed into different forms of meaning. However, most of his historical semantic works focus on concepts (exceptions include his works about religion, art, and love). Forms of meaning have their own history and are not ontologically given. It follows, then, that the forms that can be analyzed through a semantic history are not predetermined and fixed. The question of what forms are to be placed under the scope of a historical semantic analysis is in itself a historical semantic question. Forms of meaning are created and transformed over time. The forms of empirical data are, thus, also historically constituted and subject to change. Besides concepts, other forms of meaning include symbols, images, ideas, rituals, and icons. While concepts differentiate themselves from what they describe, symbols often integrate this difference, thereby giving access to that which is normally inaccessible. For example, as a form of meaning, religious symbols give access to that which is holy. Different rituals, like praying, do the same. Such symbols and rituals are different from, for example, a concept that purports to describe a God. Unlike the concept, they perform a connection to the divine. Symbols are units of differences between the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, the accessible and the inaccessible, and they must, therefore, be analyzed in a different way compared to concepts (Luhmann 2000, 169; 2012, 141; 2013, 245; Stenner and Andersen 2020).

The semantic historical analysis begins with the collection of material. For instance, one might be interested in the creation of a new reservoir revolving around ‘robustness’ and ‘resilience.’ One then begins by finding all the literature that has led to the concepts’ current statuses. Contrary to Foucault, Luhmann’s mantra was not to ‘read everything!’ Luhmann was primarily interested in cared semantics. Concepts are best cultivated in texts that are carefully written, which is why Luhmann was less concerned with the quantity of texts and more with their quality. It is in these texts that the creation of meaning and its condensation into concepts can be most clearly observed.

While Foucault began his analysis with a negative work that was supposed to lead to so-called discursive facts, Luhmann’s approach was more focused on systematic observations of differences and their conditioning. Both theorists avoid a hermeneutic view. This resistance to the praxes of understanding and interpretation is grounded in their fundamental approach of observing how something is observed (rather than what and why). The historical semantic analysis investigates how concepts are created. Concepts are understood as a condensation and generalization of a diversity of meaning and expectations. Concepts cannot be unambiguously defined, because the diversity of meaning is tied to the concept’s form which embodies its opposition to a counter-concept. A concept, then, is observed as a unit of difference between concept and counter-concept.

In all creation of meaning, three dimensions are present: object, temporal, and the social dimension. These dimensions are constituted by different types of differences. The object dimension is constituted through differences like this/everything else. The temporal dimension is constituted through a sort of double horizon where the present is constituted against the past and the future: future/present/past. Finally, the social dimension is constituted through differences like us/them. The three dimensions make it possible to explore how concepts/counter-concepts are connected and how they condense expectations. The historical semantic analysis is complete, when one has shown how meaning has been created and condensed into concepts, and how the semantic reservoir has been transformed over time, finally reaching its contemporary form. That is, when one has achieved a close description of how something came to be, and of the semantic conditions of possibility for the contemporary communication.

From an analytical point of view, the historical semantic analysis and its description of the systems, their differentiation, couplings, and paradoxes only mark a point of departure for further analyses. The reservoir of concepts merely constitutes empirical data for future use. For Luhmann, empirical data were neither made up of conditioned facts about what really happened, nor by discursive facts, but rather by concepts as form units of differences between concept and counter-concept. The historical semantic analysis creates empirical data as loosely coupled concepts which then constitute a medium through which society’s systems and their differentiation may be observed. Therefore, the researcher’s ability to observe systems is contingent upon the quality of the semantic analysis. The richer the semantic analysis, the more observational options. In other words, it is the description of the semantic reservoir of loosely coupled elements which enables observations of how systems themselves observe. The communication is gone, but its traces can be found hidden away in condensed forms.

Concluding discussion

We began this article with the assertion that the form of history depends on the empirical medium for observation. Empirical material become a medium for scientific observation, when the research process cuts the material into loosely coupled elements that allow a certain potential for observation and formation. Elements loosely coupled to each other such as loosely coupled facts or loosely coupled discursive events or loosely coupled concepts are produced from within the research process be it within source criticism, negative work or semantic analysis to create forms that are needed for research, such as ‘descriptions,’ ‘theses,’ ‘explanations,’ and ‘interpretations.’ How we gestalt history as for example ‘deep images’, ‘ruptures in discourse formations’ or as ‘evolutions in differentiated systems’ thus depends on the forming potential offered by the medium of empirical material. Nobody has ever seen a system directly. Systems theorists claim that a particular system is there due to the production of certain history of semantic. We see everything through something else.

The article then proceeded to examine how Kr. Erslev, Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and Niklas Luhmann each constructed media of empirical material that permitted radically different gestalts of history. Erslev’s source criticism created a medium of loosely coupled conditioned facts that made it possible to give history the form of ‘a deep image.’ White constructed the empirical data as loosely coupled narratives, which allowed him to form meta-histories. Foucault’s negative work cut the material into loosely coupled discursive facts affording the possibility of writing history as formations of discourse. And finally, Luhmann’s semantic history constructed the empirical data as a reservoir of loosely coupled concepts that created conditions for observations of social systems and their differentiation.

Observing how history is observed through differences between form and medium is one way through which to inquire into the modes of production of historical knowledge. As Elena Esposito formulates it: ‘Somewhat provocatively, one could say that instead of shrinking, the extension of reality grows considerably larger to now include observations themselves as operations taking place in the world’ (Esposito 1996, 279). Table 1 summarizes each approach to the creation of medium for observation.

Table 1. Observing how Erslev, White, Foucault, and Luhmann observe.

	Form	Medium	The unobservable outside
Erslev	The creation of a deep image of history	Single, conditioned, loosely coupled facts reconstructed through source criticism	What really happened
White	Meta-Narratives as history of history	Loosely coupled tropes such a metaphor constructed by cutting up given narratives	The past ‘in itself’
Foucault	Discourse formation	Loosely coupled statements and discursive facts	Emergence and articulation
Luhmann	Differentiation of systems	Semantic as reservoir of loosely coupled concepts	Communication that disappears as it operates

The main contribution of our analyses of form and media in the historical research process is that it provides a new key for understanding the heterogeneity offered by different historical perspectives. This heterogeneity cannot be reduced to the theoretical or disciplinary differences, and it is impossible to overcome through dialogue. Instead, dialogs can unveil to its partners, how different research programs create different insights. This approach acknowledges the significance of varying perspectives, without necessarily aiming for integration or an ideal of friction-free dialogue. History is the product of the historians’ research program, and thus varies according to the point of observation and the forming process. This opens for a new dialogue about how different research programs observe the past, and how different programs give different historical accounts of the past. We must abandon the idea of ‘the past’ or ‘the history’ as singular units. The past is always a past for an observer who observes it though a medium that forms the historical empirical material. It should be stressed, that this perspective is not a relativistic stance where ‘anything goes.’ It is an epistemological perspective, which offers a tool to analyze and discuss how ‘history’ is produced.

Moreover, our perspective is a contribution to the discussion on how to define history. If history is defined as ‘mobilizing the past in the present’ (Wadhwani et al. 2018), then our analysis contributes insights into how this mobilization is performed and to what happens in the process. The past is never mobilized in itself. It is always mediated through forms and media that produce the historical empirical material and the historical representation. The analysis is therefore also a contribution to the literatures on ‘uses of the past’ and rhetorical history, which understand history as a battlefield of different stakeholders who compete for historical hegemony. As an alternative or supplement to analyzing how history is used in the present for rhetorical uses or narrative battles, our perspective open spaces for discussing the preconditions for the production of histories.

Finally, we argue that our perspective helps to make historical contributions more relevant in contemporary societies and in academia. Historians tend to agree that writing history as ‘the truth’ is impossible. However, at the same time, most historians defend the idea that the historian’s aim is getting as close to the truth as possible. While this ambition might be noble and respectable, is it inconsistent and not in tune with contemporary demands for historical knowledge. The world is getting increasingly more complex and multifaceted, and the historical knowledge production should reflect this. MOH is a multidisciplinary journal, and its goal is not just to insert ‘a’ historical account research into management research. Rather, we argue that it should aim to offer a pallet of historical perspectives and analyses, which could complement each other, and thereby to attune the research to complexity and enhance its reflexivity. While this has been the idealistic ambition throughout the discussions on the historical turn, it has, hitherto, not been demonstrated theoretically how and why this reflects both academia and the world we live in.

The analyses of the four historians revealed that form and media bring something into focus while overshadowing anything else, which then becomes invisible to the observer. The same applies to our analytical lenses, and while in principle it is impossible to be fully aware of one’s blind spots, there are at least two aspects we wish to address. The first is the organizational and institutional inertia or path dependency in the fields and disciplines, which for several reasons are stronger than the disciplines acknowledge. And second, the rivalry for academic power between the fields, which includes prestige at the universities, ranking of journals, and academic societies. While the article at the theoretical level does not provide any answers to these kinds of questions, the practical process and work behind this paper may serve as an example to how an enhanced dialogue between management scholars and business historians may be achieved.

The perspective offered in this paper is alternative to those that have dominated previous discussions around the historical turn in Management and Organization Studies. As we argued in the introduction, these discussions have had three main foci. One has centered on disciplinary and theoretical differences between social science and history (e.g. Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker 2014). Another focus point has been the methodological differences between history and social sciences, for example, interviews vs. archival sources (Goldman 1994). And the last focus point has been ontological questions, such as, which approach gives the most correct and trustworthy representation of the past. Those contributions are legitimate and relevant and our aim in this paper has not been to replace them or question their value. Rather, we wanted to introduce a new perspective that could reopen the discussions, most of which seem to have led to dead ends. Our aim was to provide new insight that could reenergize the dialogue and open a new praxis that would enhance the integration of management and organization studies and history. We do not claim that our paper solves the problems nor that it outlines a new roadmap for how to fulfill the promise of the historical turn. More modestly, our paper offers a new diagnostical approach to the problems that have led to a ‘dialog of the deaf’, and in this way hopefully contributes to an increased integration.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen

Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen is professor at the Department of Business humanities and Law at Copenhagen Business School. His work concerns changes in public administration and welfare management. He has an interest in analytical strategies inspired by systems theory, conceptual, history deconstruction, and discourse analysis. He has published a number of books and articles dealing with the conceptual history of administrative decisions, the public employee, citizen and responsibility, organization and play. His latest book is: “Public management in transition. The Orchestration of potentiality” (2016 with Justine Grønbæk Pors).

Mads Mordhorst

Mads Mordhorst is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Business History at Copenhagen Business School and guest professor at Oslo University with a focus on the Nordics and civil society. His publication list includes more than 40 academic pieces, many with a Nordic perspective, and he is co-editor of the book The Making and Circulation of Nordic Models, Ideas and Images (Routledge, 2021). His research interests include branding, nation-branding, the food industry and cooperatives. He is primarily interested in how companies use history and memory in the creation of power, strategy, legitimacy and identity.